The economy is in shambles thanks to DOGE and Trump,

It's the Boomers' chickens coming home to roost. Between Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats, they voted for lower taxes, higher spending and funding it via the national equivalent of taking out loans on their kids' identity.

The pattern was consistent between Republican and Democrat admins and Congresses, which is why I tell every person I hear whining about "threats to democracy" that the greatest threat to our "democracy" is the actual behavior of our democratically elected leaders.

It's a dirty little secret that Japanese versions of games could, until Trump came back in, be bought for substantial discounts if ordered from Asian companies like Play Asia. I bought almost every first party Nintendo title I own from them for prices $48 or less when American covers at places like Amazon or Gamestop were $60.

It's basically the same cart as the North American release. They have full English vocals and text, and often major European languages covered too.

But the base price is way lower, and these aren't bootlegs. These are legit, real cartridges.

The general progression toward using AI to directly answer search queries is going to be a huge problem for content producers, and I don't think the AI firms or Google appreciate the extent of the coming fight.

The argument used to be "Google provides you value by making your content discoverable." Now, AI companies consume content and provide their own takes on it without even referring people back to the original content. Result: no revenue at all from that activity for the content provider and a tiny loss from having to serve up the content for ingestion.

Long term, expect a growing market for paywall solutions for content providers and more companies like Reddit responding to Google, OpenAI and Anthropic as though they are competitors which they really are now.

On the flip side, this could lead to genuine innovation in fintech to make it painless to pay for content to support good providers which could create a lot of opportunity for the little guy in the content creation markets.

I told ChatGPT I wanted it to implement a particular open source Java interface using a specific major version of a dependency. It mixed imports from the previous and the current major versions. Obviously... that's a problem when the major release is a major rewrite of the public API.

I asked it specifically "restrict to version X.Y.Z," it confirmed it was going to do that, then went right back to generating mixed major release code.

Wasn't a problem for me. Took 5 minutes to debug with IntelliJ's decompiler to figure out roughly what I needed since the documentation was largely hot garbage online in that particular part of the API. For a junior developer, it would have been only a marginal improvement if not a time sink.

How about making content producers, not viewers, have to verify their real identity.

Then YT can lift most of their filters on words. Kids can handle, say, a video discussing suicide in a socially acceptable way. If someone puts up a video that says "you're a troubled teen? Here's 5 painless ways to take your life" then YT can not only nuke the account, but send it to Google to categorically nuke their account, ban the user for life from Google and refer them to law enforcement for investigation.

ou'll have to actually provide some evidence if you're making a claim

I provided you a starting point in my original comment. A few months ago, there was a lot of speculation that this was incoming on YT and other social media platforms because Microsoft was firehosing Nvidia with cash.

And now all of a sudden, Microsoft announces the need to sharply cut costs.

They have every incentive to be cagey about precisely where they spent too much money because harming Nvidia indirectly harms them. Harm their narrative in the stock market, and it ripples right into Microsoft hard.

Microsoft President Brad Smith said that an estimated $80 billion in capital expenditures over the past year created pressure to reduce operating costs.

Called it... Didn't take a rocket scientist to see that the AI hardware and data center buying spree would cause an emergency cost cutting.

So yeah, AI cost a lot of jobs... just not for the expected reasons.

Anyone who had the questionable experience of deploying it could have told HP's leadership that Autonomy was super sus.

One of the gotchas, and it was a serious known issue, was that the configuration system was like "university case study in bad software design that fails silently" tier bad.

No kidding. One single screw up, I believe as little as one extra space at the end of a configuration line, could cause it to not handle the config file correctly.

And it didn't help that IIRC most or all of the data engineering side of interacting with it was done through those files. There's a reason why Elasticsearch absolutely crushed it into paste on the pavement in the enterprise markets...

"Just walk in, find the manager, shake his hand and give him your resume

Working in the DC region, Boomers don't give out that advice.

Mainly because it's a good way to get your kid arrested or killed in a hail of gunfire depending on the security level of the building.

It simply does not matter what you think about LGBTQ+. The fact is that the people who are socially center-right on this have a vote, and Firefox's marketshare collapsed when they fired Eich for supporting Prop 8. I remember seeing the outrage all across that part of the Internet.

It was so bad that if Mitchell Baker and her allies who wanted Eich gone were actively conspiring for personal profit or ideological reasons with Google to shift users over to Chrome they would have been hard-pressed to find a lawful means to achieve that end more efficiently.

It's a stark reminder that people who are not builders by trade and profession should almost never be near the levers of power over a FOSS project.

YT should do two things here, and this would probably save them a lot of grief:

1. Do a 3 strikes, you're out on false flagging content within the same year.

2. Adopt a policy that users caught organizing a brigading attack on content providers will be doxxed to the content creator at Google's discretion.

Use women and/or children as an excuse

I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt here...

Roblox and Nintendo have very similar markets. The former has had very public examples of sex offenders crawling all over its platform targeting minors. It's not a "feudalistic tactic" for Nintendo here. It's literally their legal department looking at a quasi-competitor and going "awww helll nah" and sending some requirements to the engineers to make it easy for parents to signal Uncle Sam's party van through Nintendo systems.

Nintendo is extremely clear that the purpose of its recording and review system is "to protect GameChat users, especially minors

A significant portion of their user base are minors and parents of minors. This isn't Microsoft pulling this on an audience that is mainly 18+. Nintendo is stopping just short of dunking on Roblox here. It's a "very Japanese" warning: predators, go somewhere else because we are prepared to aggressively help parents report you to law enforcement.

Microsoft also recently announced that they are slowing some and suspending other AI investments. My rough guess is that Microsoft over-invested in AI and hiring during the 2020-2023 surge and is now in an "ohhhhh fuqqqqqq" mode looking at the ROI of those moves imploding hard in the face of AI not working out as well as they hoped.

They're also supposedly sitting on a ton, an absolute glut, of Nvidia hardware they bought when they were carpet-bombing Nvidia with cash to outbid many of their rivals during the AI hypewave ~ 2-3 years ago. So make of all of that what you will.

In 2025, the average student is being told to take on a ton of debt to do this. Debt levels that we would have considered completely stupid and horrifying for an 18-22 year old. Levels that, 25 years ago, could have literally bought you most of a small house in much of the country.

Look at the job market, look at those numbers, and tell those young men they're stupid for preferring $15/hr with no debt to $25/hr with a lower interest rate credit card bill that large hanging over their heads for a degree that is of questionable value.